i Patrick W. Staib Anthropology This dissertation is approved, and it ...

Don Amado. He is still struggling to save money beyond what he must reinvest on his
farm. He relies on income from other sources, such as carpentry and building projects,
which he usually obtains via connections in the Las Grietas base-level group. While
Danilo may come across as an operator in much of the inner workings of his co-op’s
success, his tenacity is likely attributed to his political past and organizational capacity
and not to mention that he was significantly older than Adrian at the time of the
Sandinista Revolution and subsequent Contra War.
Organic and Fair Trade Inspection in San Juan del Río Coco
From the beginning of my interactions with CLUSA técnicos and coffee farmers, I
noticed their attitude of reverence surrounding the inspection of farm and cooperative
operations for organic and Fair Trade certification. The event itself had the aura of an
examination or audit. In this section, I describe some of my experiences with external
inspections of the UCA-San Juan co-op by the Organic Crop Improvement Association
(OCIA) a U.S.-based certifier, and Fairtrade Labeling International (FLO), based in
Germany, the sole international Fair Trade certifier.
This account is enhanced with local farmers’ responses to being subjected to an
external inspection in order to access better markets. These inspections have the ability to
inspire beneficial trends toward community-based, sustainable development. However, in
many cases the inspection event reinforces hierarchies and class division in rural settings
such as Las Segovias. In the following examples I juxtapose the organic inspection and
the Fair Trade inspection.
Because campesinos are so vulnerable to the imbalanced power dynamic in the
inspection procedure, Jairo Restrepo, Colombian researcher and organic farming
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